Morning Shots

November 16, 2012

News of Hostess, the company that produces Twinkies, Wonderbread, and other food items close to the hearts of many Americans, has surely hit your ears or eyes by now. Although there’s more to the story, the company essentially called it quits because its current cost structure was no longer profitable. A large part of that unprofitable structure? Union wages and pension costs.

Well it just so happens that pension costs are also wreaking havoc on the traditional public education system in America. Spending on education is increasing while American students are falling behind, yet stories of teachers paying for supplies out of pocket still permeate the media, fueling this notion that any sort of cuts to education is just wrong. Stories of what is eating up large education budgets and why ever-increasing spending never actually reaches students, however, are few and far between.

The reality is the current cost structure of the U.S. education system is, like Hostess, no longer profitable, and it’s coming at the expense of taxpayers and students. At least Hostess can shut down and say enough is enough…

by Michelle Tigani

October 30, 2012

So there’s another movie out there that pits a great teacher against the system, only this one is set in rural South Carolina and it’s based in the 1960s, not today. At the end, after imparting wisdom and knowledge, Mr. Conroy gains the support of parents but the scorn of the administration, which doesn’t understand people out of step with the status quo, despite his success. In the end, the teacher tells the island’s parents — who learned to appreciate him and value education — that they are now in charge of their children’s education. “Never Back Down,” he says. “Never Back Down.” See, the theme is indeed universal. Thank you, Hallmark Hall of Fame, for creating “The Water is Wide” and check it out when you have a chance.

I was recently asked by a famous Ed Blogger, Alexander Russo, what I thought of the “audit” by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), over how charter school funds are monitored.
The experience of reviewing this report was a reminder of the disconnect between a new way of doing public schooling and the old fashioned way. Here was my response:

Once again we have a federal agency with a 20th century mentality on schooling attempting to audit an industry it neither understands nor can fully appreciate. The purpose of the federal charter grant program was to spawn the creation of new schools and sustain existing ones through state and local entities to which these schools are accountable for results – outcomes — not process and paperwork. The fact that a reviewer felt uncomfortable or untrained or that the federal lens didn’t see allegiance to the kind of old, worn out paperwork requirements that still plague traditional districts should underscore the problem with compelling reviews like this that chase process over achievement. (By the way, those districts do compliance with financial and operational requirements really well but it has no bearing on real educational accountability!)

Arizona lacked a monitoring checklist to make comparisons between schools? How would a check list result in their being able to compare schools? The federal auditors should have FIRST been in touch with the authorizers who are monitoring accountability and second, or failing that, they could have been simply asking for the kinds of data and financial records that every non-profit should produce– namely, identifying the flow of money through budgets, audits, 990s, P&Ls etc…

Oh, but that might require to actually know something about finance and budgeting.

It might be a cool exercise to see what this supposed checklist that is at the heart

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